The French Eurovision entry this year was a thing of rare heterotopic complexity. Combining all of the best elements of the Gibb brothers' hairstyles circa 1977, Sebastien Tellier was propelled on stage in a golf cart and backed by identically bearded singers of indeterminate gender; the song as performed on stage featured an inflated transparent ball - which may have represented the planet - as an accessory to its sub-Pulp (but higher-pitched) evocation of a purported divinity inherent in a loved creature and/or transcendent being (or possibly an immanent being raised to the power of the transcendent). The vaguely 'yeh-yeh' backing vocals of a machinic monotony and precision ceased for the singer to go on one knee, in a gesture reminiscent of Johnny Logan, completely pause for a second, and to deliver the line concerning divinity once more. Including the line 'this is a token line in French' or something along those lines (in French) the song delivered a nice reminder of the lost linguistic exoticism of the Eurovision Song Contest and replied to the furore caused by the decision of FR3's voting public to select a song performed in English. Luckily youtube preserves the performance, even if I still can't identify the globe. Apparently the semi-final version was even better.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
A vestige of authentic Euro-vision
The French Eurovision entry this year was a thing of rare heterotopic complexity. Combining all of the best elements of the Gibb brothers' hairstyles circa 1977, Sebastien Tellier was propelled on stage in a golf cart and backed by identically bearded singers of indeterminate gender; the song as performed on stage featured an inflated transparent ball - which may have represented the planet - as an accessory to its sub-Pulp (but higher-pitched) evocation of a purported divinity inherent in a loved creature and/or transcendent being (or possibly an immanent being raised to the power of the transcendent). The vaguely 'yeh-yeh' backing vocals of a machinic monotony and precision ceased for the singer to go on one knee, in a gesture reminiscent of Johnny Logan, completely pause for a second, and to deliver the line concerning divinity once more. Including the line 'this is a token line in French' or something along those lines (in French) the song delivered a nice reminder of the lost linguistic exoticism of the Eurovision Song Contest and replied to the furore caused by the decision of FR3's voting public to select a song performed in English. Luckily youtube preserves the performance, even if I still can't identify the globe. Apparently the semi-final version was even better.
Montrage obligatoire: A Twentieth-century portrait
A short text from 1995 written having seen the film screened at La Pagode in Paris one afternoon in the company of many older than JLG's generation.Godard, not unlike Deleuze, has always thought that "cinema is an instrument of thought". But with Godard, as with Deleuze, cinema will never simply be at the service of thought. Instead it will produce an image of thought. For both Godard and Deleuze, thought/cinema is a "battlefield". That battlefield, however, is not one where is played out a dialectic resulting in the triumphant progress of reason. The words spoken by Samuel Fuller in Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965) accord with Deleuze's interest in what he calls the "dust" of battle: "a film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death". The latter are categories through which the film passes. For Deleuze, by providing his films with so many "reflexive types" (or conceptual personae) Godard keeps cinema on the battlefield as EVENT and not as essence, perpetrating molecularising stratagems as opposed to molarising strategies. The result is not, therefore, the proud line anchoring the plane to the transcendent, but, rather, the
broken line, a zig-zag line, which brings together the author, his characters and the world, and that which passes between them. Thus modern cinema develops new relations with thought from three points of view: the obliteration of the whole or of a totalisation of images, in favour of an outside which is inserted between them; the erasure of the internal monologue as whole of the film, in favour of a free indirect discourse and vision; the erasure of the unity of man and world, in favour of a break which now leaves us with only a belief in this world. (Cinema II, p. 188).
The film JLG/JLG (1995) sets us on the trail not of one, but of many Godards. Doubling and folding around the inflection of the bar between JLG and JLG the film unfolds as a self-portraiture (and the processual quality of portraiture as opposed to portrait is important) without subject. The elision of the subject by means of an avowed portrayal of the subject named in the film's title (named and unnamed) sees emerge the heterotopic zone of inflection marked in the bar.
Since Eisenstein and Vertov the primacy or not of montage has been a central question for theories of cinema. With Godard, however, montage becomes montrage. Of utilisation of the plan fixe in Godard, Deleuze asserts: it "effectively carries the static shot of cinema to this state where forms dissolve, and all that subsist are tiny varieties of speed between movements in composition". No longer is it a question of the ontological piety of Being, of the copula IS. In Histoire(s) du cinema (1989-1998) Godard himself frequently appears in partial silhouette at an editing table, figured in the atopic, smooth and threshold state - the smooth space - of the space between, the intermezzine space of AND. "Vous-êtes là, là!", the voiceover at the beginning of Soigne ta droite (1987) intones, as an aerial shot points earthwards (the film's subtitle is "A place on earth"), at which point a camera jolt reminds the viewer that they are precisely in this "there" (là), this shifting there, the atopia of which is ciphered in the techne of cinema, now become an irrationality incapable of being made subservient to a rational goal. Godard subjects Heidegger's being-in-the-world to a neo-baroque loosening: being-for-the-world: you are here, AND here, AND here, multiplied across the film of cinema. Your subjectivity is a genre, as one says of Hollywood musical comedy that it is a genre.
Form, emergence, space in To the One of Fictive Music
To the One of Fictive Music explores the philosophical question of the emergence into form, and traces the movement from fluid hyle to wrought object. It situates this movement in the context of another allied philosophical debate, namely that which pertains to the ontological status of a work of art. By virtue of the self-reflexive gestures pervading the language of the poem, and when placed in the context of Stevens’ other work, the question of the ontological status of the poem itself is never far from the centre of the poem’s concerns.
In a striking opening which resonates with a variety of philosophical interventions, including Aristotle, and Irigaray’s reading of Physics 4, Stevens poses his initial problematic in terms of the matricial status of the maternal body, and by extension (indeed performing the extension mentioned by Irigaray) the body of woman. The pregnant body of the opening stanza comes to term in the second. With birth there is a coterminous emergence of music. This however is not just any music, but a specific type of music wrought out of our imperfections. The emerged being retains a foothold in the fluidity of the maternal matrix (“the wind and sea/yet leaves us in them”) for as long as earth has not yet ‘become’s intwined and intermingled with the emerged body. The intermingling would be an instance of a Dasein-like reciprocity, an example perhaps of the dwelling described in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, where ‘homelessness’ “is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling” (363). For Dasein pervades space,as Hillis Miller observes (246).
The music is said to ‘give motion’: it sets something to work; it inaugurates and undertakes. This ignition or spark of music orchestrates a passive stalled foetal being half-way into life but already dragging its heels in inert matter. The poem captures this moment, which would be close to what Bernard Cache calls inflection (as in his discussion of Leibniz on mind-matter) in a synaesthetic turn whereby the animating music is the most kindred (the most related?) to the matter in question, as underlined by the fact that the gown – the formed, finished garment – of the first stanza, is itself being animated and created anew (“the weaving that you wear”) at the end of the second stanza.
The men of the third stanza are said to be reluctant to err, to stray or wander: they stick to the related, the kindred, the alike; they adhere moreover to the very structure of relation. The relation in question is to the matricial body, the hyle (which phenomenology would subject to inventory and the laws of property). But the relation is manifest in a determination to rest, to remain, not to move – an instance of what Blanchot in L’Espace littéraire calls fascination. The stasis finds expression in a holding on to the refrain which celebrates the same “clearest blooms” of the maternal matrix. Music is considered first, and is said to be superlative only when the “retention” and restraint just discussed are operative. The second, and allied, consideration is that of a vigil. The property linked to the first is intensity, the second apprehension. Music can be more of less intense whereas the vigil can apprehend more or less. Music can also “proclaim” and vaunt in a kind of spontaneous response to the kindred, the nearest, the most related (autopoeisis). By contrast the vigil can “see” and “name”. Music thus speaks while the vigil sees, but also imposes. The vigil is privileged. This statement finds itself ‘proven’ in the example of “your name”. But the name is also an image, thus indicating that the two functions of the vigil are of a piece; perhaps to name is to see. Once more synaesthaesia takes hold as name and image meld with “arrant spices” – the sonorous, the visual and the olfactory. The sun is light, illumination, that which is required to have something be “most clear”, that which is a prerequisiste for the vision of the “clearest bloom”. Thus stanza 3 reveals that it is on the boughs, bushes and scented vines that one finds these blooms: the structure of relation, the most near, the most proximate, the most belonging, the most attached, property and properties.
This structure of return, of retention, this restraint that compels men to listen only to that which is closest is however subject to qualification and dismantling in the final stanza. Here the attachment to likeness is thought to be problematic. In place of repetition that confirms the matrix and holds only to the minimal quotient of emergence, that is into form, after as swift an issuing forth as possible, the fourth stanza speaks of stretching out the process. It is a little like the concept of enfance as described by Lyotard. The come to rest too soon is to become already a gross effigy; it is to be frozen in Platonic torpor. Rather, the action advocated by the fourth stanza suggests a neoplatonic solution (close to Plotinus in particular) to the question of fallen bodies. In a sense the fallen body in the Plotinian conception has lost closeness to the divine (see Irigaray, ‘Mere de glace’); it has spurned, in Stevens’ terms, “imagination”.
In a striking opening which resonates with a variety of philosophical interventions, including Aristotle, and Irigaray’s reading of Physics 4, Stevens poses his initial problematic in terms of the matricial status of the maternal body, and by extension (indeed performing the extension mentioned by Irigaray) the body of woman. The pregnant body of the opening stanza comes to term in the second. With birth there is a coterminous emergence of music. This however is not just any music, but a specific type of music wrought out of our imperfections. The emerged being retains a foothold in the fluidity of the maternal matrix (“the wind and sea/yet leaves us in them”) for as long as earth has not yet ‘become’s intwined and intermingled with the emerged body. The intermingling would be an instance of a Dasein-like reciprocity, an example perhaps of the dwelling described in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, where ‘homelessness’ “is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling” (363). For Dasein pervades space,as Hillis Miller observes (246).
The music is said to ‘give motion’: it sets something to work; it inaugurates and undertakes. This ignition or spark of music orchestrates a passive stalled foetal being half-way into life but already dragging its heels in inert matter. The poem captures this moment, which would be close to what Bernard Cache calls inflection (as in his discussion of Leibniz on mind-matter) in a synaesthetic turn whereby the animating music is the most kindred (the most related?) to the matter in question, as underlined by the fact that the gown – the formed, finished garment – of the first stanza, is itself being animated and created anew (“the weaving that you wear”) at the end of the second stanza.
The men of the third stanza are said to be reluctant to err, to stray or wander: they stick to the related, the kindred, the alike; they adhere moreover to the very structure of relation. The relation in question is to the matricial body, the hyle (which phenomenology would subject to inventory and the laws of property). But the relation is manifest in a determination to rest, to remain, not to move – an instance of what Blanchot in L’Espace littéraire calls fascination. The stasis finds expression in a holding on to the refrain which celebrates the same “clearest blooms” of the maternal matrix. Music is considered first, and is said to be superlative only when the “retention” and restraint just discussed are operative. The second, and allied, consideration is that of a vigil. The property linked to the first is intensity, the second apprehension. Music can be more of less intense whereas the vigil can apprehend more or less. Music can also “proclaim” and vaunt in a kind of spontaneous response to the kindred, the nearest, the most related (autopoeisis). By contrast the vigil can “see” and “name”. Music thus speaks while the vigil sees, but also imposes. The vigil is privileged. This statement finds itself ‘proven’ in the example of “your name”. But the name is also an image, thus indicating that the two functions of the vigil are of a piece; perhaps to name is to see. Once more synaesthaesia takes hold as name and image meld with “arrant spices” – the sonorous, the visual and the olfactory. The sun is light, illumination, that which is required to have something be “most clear”, that which is a prerequisiste for the vision of the “clearest bloom”. Thus stanza 3 reveals that it is on the boughs, bushes and scented vines that one finds these blooms: the structure of relation, the most near, the most proximate, the most belonging, the most attached, property and properties.
This structure of return, of retention, this restraint that compels men to listen only to that which is closest is however subject to qualification and dismantling in the final stanza. Here the attachment to likeness is thought to be problematic. In place of repetition that confirms the matrix and holds only to the minimal quotient of emergence, that is into form, after as swift an issuing forth as possible, the fourth stanza speaks of stretching out the process. It is a little like the concept of enfance as described by Lyotard. The come to rest too soon is to become already a gross effigy; it is to be frozen in Platonic torpor. Rather, the action advocated by the fourth stanza suggests a neoplatonic solution (close to Plotinus in particular) to the question of fallen bodies. In a sense the fallen body in the Plotinian conception has lost closeness to the divine (see Irigaray, ‘Mere de glace’); it has spurned, in Stevens’ terms, “imagination”.
The Downpour of the gaze in Tsai
The Downpour of the Gaze:
Contingency, Chance and Contiguity in Tsai’s The Hole
The generative centre of the film is a plague/epidemic which has afflicted the city. Official dictates heard over the radio on the soundtrack urge the public to evacuate. Those
who remain do so in flagrant defiance both of logic and the law. It is this liminal state that Tsai locates his narrative: a spatio-temporal co-ordinate /locus from which whereon/in normativity is in abeyance.
This is of course a frequent recourse in cinema: war, plague, cataclysm...these ruptures in normative civil management offer the filmmaker an opportunity to explore a limit situation wherein the organisation of the social body breaks down and begins to spawn mutating and transformative alliances and ruptures.
In Deleuze’s concept of naturalism it is often the building which offers a link with nature - a primordial undifferentiated continuum measurable only in intensities. Tsai’s film clearly belongs to this tradition with its dual onslaught of rain and pestilence. The rain establishes a relentless and univocal backdrop, a continuum. The hole which appears between the two floors of the apartment block enables, ultimately, the downward gaze and voyeurism of the man.
Within the gaping space of the evacuated city - the man steadfastly continues to open his stall in
the abandoned market - is opened up also, however, a ludic possibility. Via the widening hole the man and woman play out a strange and mute courtship (any reading of the film which insists on viewing the hole in a predominantly sexually symbolic register as orifice to be penetrated is missing much). As the downpour persists and as all continues to precipitate (notably the bags of rubbish which plummet to the ground throughout the film), the film offers its own ruptures in that continuity in the form of the song and dance sequences in the elevator and along the walkways of the building (the entire film is dedicated to the Hong Kong chanteuse Grace Chang). The economy and the traffic human and otherwise of the film takes place within these thoroughfares, only one of which is the hole.
Tsai’s film seems to acknowledge, with Jean-François Lyotard, that in the contemporary megalopolis there is “only transit, transfer, translation and difference. It is not the house passing away, like a mobile home or the shepherd’s hut, it is in passing that we dwell” [The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991) 198]. The film can be located within this economy of ‘passage’.
Contingency, Chance and Contiguity in Tsai’s The Hole
The generative centre of the film is a plague/epidemic which has afflicted the city. Official dictates heard over the radio on the soundtrack urge the public to evacuate. Those
who remain do so in flagrant defiance both of logic and the law. It is this liminal state that Tsai locates his narrative: a spatio-temporal co-ordinate /locus from which whereon/in normativity is in abeyance.This is of course a frequent recourse in cinema: war, plague, cataclysm...these ruptures in normative civil management offer the filmmaker an opportunity to explore a limit situation wherein the organisation of the social body breaks down and begins to spawn mutating and transformative alliances and ruptures.
In Deleuze’s concept of naturalism it is often the building which offers a link with nature - a primordial undifferentiated continuum measurable only in intensities. Tsai’s film clearly belongs to this tradition with its dual onslaught of rain and pestilence. The rain establishes a relentless and univocal backdrop, a continuum. The hole which appears between the two floors of the apartment block enables, ultimately, the downward gaze and voyeurism of the man.
Within the gaping space of the evacuated city - the man steadfastly continues to open his stall in
the abandoned market - is opened up also, however, a ludic possibility. Via the widening hole the man and woman play out a strange and mute courtship (any reading of the film which insists on viewing the hole in a predominantly sexually symbolic register as orifice to be penetrated is missing much). As the downpour persists and as all continues to precipitate (notably the bags of rubbish which plummet to the ground throughout the film), the film offers its own ruptures in that continuity in the form of the song and dance sequences in the elevator and along the walkways of the building (the entire film is dedicated to the Hong Kong chanteuse Grace Chang). The economy and the traffic human and otherwise of the film takes place within these thoroughfares, only one of which is the hole.Tsai’s film seems to acknowledge, with Jean-François Lyotard, that in the contemporary megalopolis there is “only transit, transfer, translation and difference. It is not the house passing away, like a mobile home or the shepherd’s hut, it is in passing that we dwell” [The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991) 198]. The film can be located within this economy of ‘passage’.
Losing touch with the image
A rejected abstract for a conference paper.
On serait tenté de dire que la pensée est toujours locataire: toujours en un lieue, toujours dans le lieu et l’avoir-lieu, mais jamais comme propriétaire, ayant sa propriété dans le transport et dans le déménagement. (Jean-Luc Nancy)
According to the formulation of Jean-Luc Nancy thought rents a place but never owns it. Its property and its properties inhere in transport, in moving from place to place. In an era characterised by fluidity of boundaries, in an era identified by pre-set obsolescence, by new velocities demanding a new ethology (in Virilio’s terms, a dromology), the era of dislocation is in full flow. The discipline of film studies is subject to a particular trauma in this context. As books such as Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film suggest, on the one hand its specificity as understood in a certain historical context is, in the eyes of some, already in the past, while for others that specificity is feast moveable through new supports and channels of viewing. In the first case what remains for writing and teaching in the area of film studies is a thanatographic enterprise, in the second a potentially problematic neutrality. What if the object of scrutiny – cinema -, the exemplar intended to stand in for the vanishing discipline (of Film Studies underpinned by ‘Theory’) were obstinately to remain lost in its out of joint “conducts of time” (Alliez), were itself intermittent (to use a Rancièrean formulation), or interstitial (to use a more Deleuzean vocabulary)? This paper attempts to sketch an answer to these questions by returning to an idea put forward by Raymond Bellour some twenty years ago but explored afresh in the light of key films in the intervening period where the ‘touch’ of video (and other media) and film takes place. It will be suggested that this ‘touch’ represents a challenge to the teaching of film studies as well as suggesting the exigency of film theory in the face of cognitivist and other declarations of abandonment. The argument will draw, inter alia, on examples from Rivette, Egoyan, Godard, Sissako and Gordon and Parreno.
On serait tenté de dire que la pensée est toujours locataire: toujours en un lieue, toujours dans le lieu et l’avoir-lieu, mais jamais comme propriétaire, ayant sa propriété dans le transport et dans le déménagement. (Jean-Luc Nancy)
According to the formulation of Jean-Luc Nancy thought rents a place but never owns it. Its property and its properties inhere in transport, in moving from place to place. In an era characterised by fluidity of boundaries, in an era identified by pre-set obsolescence, by new velocities demanding a new ethology (in Virilio’s terms, a dromology), the era of dislocation is in full flow. The discipline of film studies is subject to a particular trauma in this context. As books such as Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film suggest, on the one hand its specificity as understood in a certain historical context is, in the eyes of some, already in the past, while for others that specificity is feast moveable through new supports and channels of viewing. In the first case what remains for writing and teaching in the area of film studies is a thanatographic enterprise, in the second a potentially problematic neutrality. What if the object of scrutiny – cinema -, the exemplar intended to stand in for the vanishing discipline (of Film Studies underpinned by ‘Theory’) were obstinately to remain lost in its out of joint “conducts of time” (Alliez), were itself intermittent (to use a Rancièrean formulation), or interstitial (to use a more Deleuzean vocabulary)? This paper attempts to sketch an answer to these questions by returning to an idea put forward by Raymond Bellour some twenty years ago but explored afresh in the light of key films in the intervening period where the ‘touch’ of video (and other media) and film takes place. It will be suggested that this ‘touch’ represents a challenge to the teaching of film studies as well as suggesting the exigency of film theory in the face of cognitivist and other declarations of abandonment. The argument will draw, inter alia, on examples from Rivette, Egoyan, Godard, Sissako and Gordon and Parreno.
The moustache of Jean Ferrat
I think I picked up my cassette version at a French motorway service station en route to Tuscany via Geneva in 2002. It is the destiny of the cassette to remain in the car, resilient in the face of all manner of maltreatment. It is a magnificently defiant analogue.
Jean Ferrat’s moustache on the cover of the Master série collection (vol. 1) seems about to take flight from his upper lip.
The mouth of which the latter forms precisely 50% of the surface is arranged in an expression of earnest and inquisitive gazing skyward as if at a satellite or a bizarre conflagration at the zenith. There is s truly remarkable replication by his left eyebrow of the fold of his eyelid which both curl in mimicry of the moustache’s corresponding extremity. The head of hair frames the face, a central spiral protrudes from the centre of the forehead with superabundance. The wrinkles at the extremity of the eyes curl upward. Cheekbones prod out of the flesh. It is a complex face worthy of 'Au printemps de quoi revais-tu?'
Jean Ferrat’s moustache on the cover of the Master série collection (vol. 1) seems about to take flight from his upper lip.
The mouth of which the latter forms precisely 50% of the surface is arranged in an expression of earnest and inquisitive gazing skyward as if at a satellite or a bizarre conflagration at the zenith. There is s truly remarkable replication by his left eyebrow of the fold of his eyelid which both curl in mimicry of the moustache’s corresponding extremity. The head of hair frames the face, a central spiral protrudes from the centre of the forehead with superabundance. The wrinkles at the extremity of the eyes curl upward. Cheekbones prod out of the flesh. It is a complex face worthy of 'Au printemps de quoi revais-tu?'
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Author author
Reading Gilbert Adair reminiscing about his two meetings with Alain Robbe-Grillet in last Saturday's Guardian reminded me of my own failed attempt to join with the then mere 70 year old nouveau romancier on a tour of the late night watering holes (a limited range of which existed in those days) of a small provincial city. The arts centre had hosted the bearded one for a talk and screening of L'homme qui ment I think, and I had foolishly attempted to ask him a question in French following his talk. Even more foolishly it was something about the represenatation of women in his films. I was attempting in French to stir a bit of controversy with AR-G. In some respects it was fortunate that my self translation rendered the question meaningless to him, while the interpreter deliberately made it even more innocuous, in a distinctly ideology-free version of whatever it was I had concocted merely in order to feel I had participated in an important event. (Subsequent years have hardly lessened the engrainment of this particular trait, it has to be said.) Undaunted I repaired upstairs to the bar and, after a nervous wait observing AR-G and his host from the other side of the room, I eventually encroached on their space, mumbling something along the lines of "admired your....", "always found your...", ..."extremely...", "great honour" etc. The host somehow failed to take advantage of my no doubt endlessly stimulating company on behalf of AR-G and so I skulked back into my corner. Bumping into the host a couple of years ago I attempted to get him to regale me with the tale of the night AR-G hit the town's hotspots. Neither was he amused by my prying, nor, it seemed, had his sense that I had no right to participate even in the most vicarious manner (which was, after all, the merest scrap I had left of the non-event) dimished.
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